against the Italians, by whose efforts and those of France and Great Britain they had so recently been liberated, then would the Southern Slavs be guilty of monstrous folly and ingratitude." Baron Sonnino might have apprehended that more knowledge of the Yugoslav-Italian situation would produce among the Allies more hostility; he should have known that average Frenchmen do not buy their favourite newspaper for what it says on foreign politics, and that the _Journal des Débats_ and the _Humanité_ have many followers who rarely read them. And, above all else, he should have seen that the Americans, who had not signed the Treaty of London, would decline to lend themselves to the enforcement of an antiquated pact which was so grievously incongruous with Justice, to say nothing of the Fourteen Points of Mr. Wilson. But Sonnino threw all these considerations to the winds. He should have reconciled himself to the fact that his London Treaty, if for no other reason than that it was a secret one, belonged to a different age and was really dead; his refusal to bury it was making him unpopular with the neighbours. One does not expect a politician to be quite consistent, and Baron Sonnino is, after all, not the same man who in 1881 declared that to claim Triest as a right would be an exaggeration of the principle of nationalities; but he should not in 1918 have been deaf to the words which he considered of such weight when he wrote them in 1915 that he caused them to be printed in a Green Book. "The monarchy of Savoy," he said in a telegram to the Duke of Avarna on February 15 of that year, "has its staunchest root in the fact that it personifies the national ideals." Baron Sonnino was rallying to the House of Karageorgević most of those among the Croats and Slovenes who, for some reason or other, had been hesitating; for King Peter personified the national ideals which the Baron was endeavouring to throttle. As Mr. Wickham Steed pointed out in a letter to the _Corriere della Sera_, the complete accord between Italians and Yugoslavs is not only possible and necessary, but constitutes a European interest of the first order; if it be not realized, the Adriatic would become not Italian nor Slav, but German; if, on the other hand, it were brought about, then the language and the culture, the commerce and the political influence of Italy would not merely be maintained but would spread along the eastern Adriatic coast and in the Balkans in a manner hitherto unhoped for; if no accord be reached, then the Italians would see their whole influence vanish from every place not occupied by overwhelming forces. But Sonnino, a descendant of rancorous Levantines and obstinate Scots, went recklessly ahead; it made you think that he was one of those unhappy people whom the gods have settled to destroy. He neglected the most elementary precautions; he ought to have requested, for example, that the French and British and Americans would everywhere be represented where Yugoslav